Tuesday, 10 June 2014

Books , O'Reilly Reviews , Tech

Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy

An Inspiring Introduction ★★★☆

I've worked a little with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) before, getting the bulk of my information from programming guides.

This book presented an opportunity to go back to basics: to review the protocol stack from top to bottom and patch in the gaps in my knowledge. On that account it succeeded very well.

There are many components to BLE, and a seemingly unending vocabulary to learn (care to distinguish profiles, procedures, protocols, or ATT versus GATT?). "Getting Started with Bluetooth Low Energy" does a tremendous job at guiding the reader through the scenery, pointing out subtleties and traps along the way.

In particular, the tour of the protocol stack presented in Chapter 2 is wonderful, describing everything from the application down to the low-level radio components (and how those lower levels necessarily impact the behaviour of frameworks and apps).

In places I would've liked a little more detail (I'm a sucker for packet traces, and there's scant information about specific profiles built on top of GATT), but the book has inspired me to dig deeper and continue learning about BLE elsewhere. And that's the key point: I was expecting to learn, but in addition to that I was energised. While I previously had in mind one application for which I could use BLE, I now have dozens of ideas.

[Note: I received a free copy of this book through the O'Reilly Reader Review Program.]

Posted by pab at 14:02 | Comments will be back one day. Please email me instead!